The fact that the Chinese state today includes both desert and sown reflects the culmination of a long and thus far triumphant historical process, which, in turn, provides the geographical basis for Chinese power. Indeed, the reason why China is now developing a great naval presence in the South and East China seas is that China, finally, in modern times, has the ability to do so, a luxury afforded by its erstwhile conquest of the desert and steppeland periphery going counterclockwise from Manchuria to Inner Mongolia to Xinjiang to Tibet, thus protecting the arable cradle of Han culture from hostile incursions. Secure and dominant on land, Beijing can now go to sea.
The domination of a large part of Islamic Central Asia has a basis in Chinese history—medieval Tang armies threaded their way between Mongolia and Tibet to establish protectorates as far away as Khorasan in northeastern Iran, thus further enabling the Silk Road. At the same time, though, we should remember that East Turkestan—the area of Xinjiang—was taken back by the Manchu Qing Dynasty only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is not truly part of historical China to the same degree as the arable cradle.
So the question becomes whether the dominant Han people, who comprise more than 90 percent of China’s population and live mainly in the arable cradle, will be able to keep the Uighur Turks, Tibetans, and Inner Mongolians who live on the periphery permanently under control, with a minimum degree of unrest. The fate of the Chinese state will hinge on this geographical issue, especially in the face of economic and political disruptions that loom large.
The next thirty years in Chinese history are not going to be as smooth as the last thirty years. While analysts in the United States might ferociously complain about China’s lack of transparency, about its autocratic system, and about its naval aggression in the South and East China seas, China, especially since the end of Deng Xiaoping’s rule, has been governed by a collegial group of enlightened autocrats and technocrats, conservative in nature and averse to risk taking, so that China has generated relatively few surprises. This has helped encourage a bipartisan consensus on China policy in Washington, with the differences between Democrats and Republicans muted compared to the disputes that envenom Middle East policy. But more than three decades of double-digit growth, in addition to generating vast and profound contradictions and inefficiencies in the Chinese economy, have also created a more sophisticated, restive, and socially complex society—one that is harder to satisfy. China is now a crucible. The leadership has become ever more centralized and autocratic, with a personality cult beginning to form around President Xi Jinping, even as the economy requires a never-ending stimulus merely to run in place. The dramatic decline of economic growth in recent years is only the beginning of a tumultuous transformation that will test the rulers of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as never before.
The decline and fall of dynasties and empires has always been a messy business. And one should never forget that the CCP is another Chinese dynasty that runs an empire of desert and sown, with non-Han peoples on the periphery dominating much of the land area: an area containing the water, copper, iron ore, and other resources upon which inner China relies. Xinjiang, twice the size of Texas, is now becoming a transport corridor for roads, rail, and energy pipelines—part of the new Silk Road connecting China with Central Asia and eventually the Middle East and Europe. Not only is the bazaar in Kashgar full of Chinese-made consumer goods, but so, too, are the bazaars in the nearby former Soviet republics, demonstrating the stubborn dynamism of the Chinese economy at the most basic level. China’s economic and strategic reach, moreover, may eventually extend south from Kashgar to the Indian Ocean, as Xi announced in April the building of a major transport system from Xinjiang to the Pakistani port of Gwadar. As a result, Beijing can tolerate no substantial unrest in Xinjiang, even as the security atmosphere features ethnic tension and increasing violent attacks by Uighurs against Han Chinese. Here in East Turkestan is where China’s attempt at empire building is most pronounced and also where the Chinese state is most brittle.
Of course, experts have been discussing the possibility of the collapse of the CCP for years. But what would that collapse actually look like? Would it be merely the conversion of a collegial one-party system into a highly centralized and efficient authoritarianism; or a military coup from within that keeps the party nominally in control; or a slow rot that takes years and decades to play out? Remember, while the fall of the Soviet Union happened within a few short years, the Ottoman Empire, the “sick man of Europe,” took more than a century to expire. In any event, whether the center transforms into something entirely new or crumbles slowly from within, the relationship between inner China and outer China could somehow change. The places that I visited may increasingly comprise a police state controlled from Beijing—or they could be at the forefront of China’s subtle fragmentation, in which China reverts back by degrees to its arable cradle. I believe the former possibility is much greater than the latter one, but the latter one cannot be ruled out.
We have already seen chaos in quite a few Middle Eastern and African states. But China could yet evince unrest of a kind that could engulf not only itself but also other states in Central Asia, which are linguistically and culturally part of historic Turkestan. The adjacent Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union have yet to experience a post-Soviet upheaval, even as their aged leaders will soon pass from the scene, exposing regimes that lack fundamental legitimacy at the same time that the United States continues its withdrawal from neighboring Afghanistan. In none of these places do ethnic borders coincide with official ones. A place like Kashgar might normally be associated with back-of-beyond travel writing. But, in fact, it could be at the center of the geopolitical world.
To Elizabeth M. Lockyer
BY ROBERT D. KAPLAN
The Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century
Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World
In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond
Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific
The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power
Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground
Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground
Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and the Peloponnese
Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos
Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus
The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War
An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future
The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia
The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite
Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History
Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea
About the Author
ROBERT D. KAPLAN is the bestselling author of eighteen books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including The Return of Marco Polo’s World, Earning the Rockies, In Europe’s Shadow, Asia’s Cauldron, The Revenge of Geography, Monsoon, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. He is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a senior advisor at Eurasia Group. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He held the national security chair at the United States Naval Academy and was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. He is currently a member of the U.S. Navy’s Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazi
ne twice named him one of the world’s Top 100 Global Thinkers.
robertdkaplan.com
cnas.org
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The Return of Marco Polo's World Page 26